Hi,
how many users can Ms Access concurrently support?
In theoretical terms, the maximum number of connections, or users who would
be 255.
However in actual practical terms, it's nowhere close to that number of
users.
over the years we've had some reports that as many as 100 users who have
been attached to a file share back in database. mind you that was quite a
few years ago, and it was in an environment where absolutely everything was
just a absolutely perfect.
in practical terms twenty are 30 users is a good number, and if you have a
well designed application, it certainly well within the limits of MS access.
Today because SQL server is now free, you can continue to use MS access at
your front end, but move the back end data part to SQL server. In other
words you can continue to run MS access your front end, and the number of
concurrent users of your application is only going to be limited by the
capacity of your SQL server.
So, the "sweet" spot is about 1-20 users. You can actually get higher
numbers of users than 25 if your application as well designed. In fact, the
problem is often NOT the number of users performance wise but the increased
risk of corruption (file damage) to the back end database file. In other
words it's not performance that prevents you from having more users, but it
will be the frequency in which the database is damaged.
Keep in mind that sometimes we see posts here that a user only has one user
in the application and say it's running slow. If your application running
slow with one or two users, I don't think it's going to run very well with
twenty users.
So the answer really depends much on how well your application is written.
The better your application is, and the better your designs are in terms of
performance, the likelihood that you'll be able to run more and more users.
So the practical limit for the number of users is going to vary from
application to application. In all these cases you'll never really reach the
theoretical maximum of 255 users.
However, at the end of the day if you do outgrow the number of users, you
can always move the back end part to SQL server and continue to use MS
access as your front application part...
